Rajasthan's Royal Retreats -- Forst, Palaces Reflect Splendor Of Bygone India

In the courtyard of a centuries-old hilltop fort in India, hundreds of men, chanting and sweating in the hot sun, pressed toward a small Hindu temple tucked into the stone walls.

They surged between lines of baton-wielding police who kept order, barely, during a religious celebration at the sprawling Amber Fort in the Indian state of Rajasthan.

Wives and children, waiting their turn to enter the temple, snacked on bananas and sticky cakes. Semi-wild monkeys roamed among them, boldly snatching food from the unwary.

Families with a few more rupees to spend clustered around booths offering Pepsi and coconut slices, plastic dolls and garlands of marigolds. In the shade of one booth, a beggar wiggled the stumps of his arms.

Giggling villagers, unused to seeing Western tourists, beckoned to them to come pose for their family photos. A mother in an electric-orange sari smiled her thanks.

A microcosm of India

This day in Amber Fort was a snapshot of India, a microcosm of a country swirling in religion and history, and in crowds, near-chaos and kindness.

I had arrived at Amber, a 400-year-old fortress-palace now run by the government and open to visitors, on the third day of a fall trip to India. I was still a bit jet-lagged and more than a bit overwhelmed by the kaleidoscope of India's daily life.

I hadn't expected to walk into the middle of a religious festival. But it was Dussehra, an annual Hindu celebration

associated with the vanquishing of demons. And the temple at Amber Fort, with its shrine to a goddess of war, obviously was a place to be.

Villagers had taken the day off from tending their livestock and fields of rice and wheat to come to Amber. They and their urban countrymen from the bustling city of Jaipur, eight miles away, had traveled along traffic-snarled, potholed roads on buses so jammed that young men rode on the rooftops.

Rajasthan's royalty

Amber Fort sprawls across a windy ridge, commanding the semi-desert countryside for miles around. Its battlements and sheer stone walls, more than three blocks long, enclose dozens of rooms and courtyards. The town of Amber clusters at its base, a 15-minute walk down the steep hill on a cobbled path.

The fortress-palace was the stronghold of a succession of maharajas, the royal rulers of Rajasthan who for centuries reigned over the feudal kingdoms that preceded modern India. Much of Amber Fort was built in the late 1500s, although the area has been a stronghold of royalty and Rajput warrior clans since the 11th century.

Amber's shaded colonnades and breezy rooms, with their high ceilings and stone-royal families and their servants, soldiers and harems.

The rooms are empty now of any furnishings, filled only by the dust-scented desert wind and the chatter of visitors. But the walls are covered with intricate mosaics - including Islamic-influenced inlays of inch-square mirrors and precious stones - and by elaborate frescoes that recall Amber's past glories.

Palaces galore

Amber is one of the most imposing of Rajasthan's palaces, but dozens of other palaces and forts are scattered across this state of northwestern India.

Some palaces and smaller family mansions have been turned into museums or schools, but dozens have been converted in recent years to what are called palace hotels or heritage hotels.

These hotels give guests the feeling of the princely past of India while providing Western-standard creature comforts. They feel like the set of a PBS television mini-series come to life - a "land of the the rajas" in living color.

Camels, with their haughty heads held high, plod past the palaces' ochre and sandstone-pink walls. Dignified old men with handlebar mustaches stand guard at arched gateways. Peacocks roam walled gardens. Men in turbans and women with veiled faces glide across tiled floors. Rooms are filled with carved wood furniture, mosaics and murals, Persian carpets and richly patterned draperies.

The palace hotels have helped make Rajasthan one of India's prime destinations for foreign tourists. The state capital, Jaipur, which has some of the most luxurious heritage hotels, can be reached in a half-day by car, train or plane from New Delhi, the Indian capital and gateway to the country for most visitors. The town of Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, is another half-day's travel away.

Visitors could easily spend two weeks on this "golden triangle" of New Delhi-Rajasthan-Taj Mahal. Those with little time could hit some of its high points in several days.

One of Rajasthan's biggest attractions is the annual camel fair in the desert town of Pushkar. Tens of thousands of tourists and camel traders - and thousands of camels, the work horses of Rajasthan - descend each fall for a week upon the normally tranquil town.

Camels are admired, traded and raced on the sand flats on the outskirts of Pushkar. Tent cities and impromptu markets spring up everywhere for the fair, usually held in mid-November.

Bright spots needed

India needs tourism bright spots such as Rajasthan, especially after the deadly mid-air collision last month of two planes near New Delhi and the lingering separatist violence that has closed off the one-time tourist mecca of Kashmir in the far north (where several Westerners, including a man from Spokane, were taken hostage 1 1/2 years ago and whose fate remains unclear).

But the heritage hotels of Rajasthan are luring foreign tourists, especially Europeans and a gradually increasing number of Americans.

"The heritage hotel idea has really just set in recently, and many of the hotels have come in the last three or four years," said Sanjay Saxena, director of Indian travel for Geographic Expeditions of California, whose tours include stays at some of Rajasthan's heritage hotels.

"Some palaces or mansions were being run as hotels earlier, but they were really in a pretty poor state and only budget travelers went to them. Now they're being revamped, and the government is encouraging it."

Some heritage hotels, such as the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur, are spectacularly luxurious with sumptuous decor, fountained gardens and lavish restaurants.

At such places, visitors can retreat from the turbulence of daily life in India for a price similar to luxury accommodations in the West - easily $150 a night and up.

In small towns, however, heritage hotels can be found for a fraction of that price. Some of the old family mansions, known as "haveli," have been converted to simple, but atmospheric, hotels that cost $30 a night or less.

I found my retreat at Samode Palace, a heritage hotel tucked into the arid hills of Rajasthan about 30 miles north of Jaipur. It's generally ranked as "mid-range" in quality and price and costs about $70 a night (still a princely sum in India where the per capita annual income is about $1,300).

To me, Samode Palace felt like a luxurious fantasy of India come true. It was a peaceful and architecturally enchanting hotel where I would have liked to stay for days, not just a weekend.

Country life

After driving for hours along the chaotic, congested highway from New Delhi to Rajasthan it was a relief to turn onto the quiet country road that leads to Samode.

Along the winding road, fields of grain shimmered in the hot sun. Rocky hills rose above the fields, some topped by the crumbling remains of centuries-old watchtowers. In front of a low stone house, shaded by palm and tamarind trees, a girl filled water buckets from a long-handled pump. At a natural spring by the side of the road, women scrubbed clothes on rocks and hung them on bushes to dry.

Camels, looming twice as high as the few private cars, sauntered along pulling wood carts piled high with produce and people. In one cart, a dozen women stood shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling and giggling as they headed to a village market. The dry wind whipped their ankle-length red skirts and shawls, the traditional dress of Rajasthan women.

Samode Palace came into view like a mirage, rising above the cobbled streets and stone houses of the village of Samode.

High walls and an arched gateway protect the four-story palace, which was constructed in the late 18th century and nestles in a fold between steep hills. The yellow-pink stone building is graced with cupolas, quiet courtyards, rooftop terraces, ornately decorated public rooms and antique-furnished guest rooms. One of Samode's public rooms, the Sheesh Mahal, is decorated with intricate glass mosaics, as fine as those of Amber Fort which are considered among Rajasthan's best.

The palace and its garden have been lovingly restored by Yadavendra Singh and his wife, Arpana Singh, a cosmopolitan young Indian couple who run the 35-room hotel. As they walked through their hotel, turbaned staff pressed their palms together at chest height and murmured "Namaste," the traditional greeting.

This part of Rajasthan has been under the control of Yadavendra Singh's family for 450 years, and portraits of his ancestors and Rajasthan royalty adorn the walls.

These noble families lost much of their power, land and money in the 1800s and early 1900s to the British rulers of India. After India's independence, a final blow was the heavy taxation and other restrictions imposed by the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.

By the late 1970s, Samode Palace had deteriorated. The family tried to sell it, but there were no buyers. So Yadavendra Singh and his brother opened it for tours and luncheons, and in 1987 turned it into a hotel to preserve it and make money.

In Samode's Durbar Hall, where noblemen once held court, hotel guests sit on maroon floor cushions and feast on traditional Indian food at low tables. Every inch of the two-story-high hall is covered with intricate mosaics and murals.

Six of us dined there in echoing splendor one evening, with white-gloved servants passing a dozen different dishes among us. In an archway of the mezzanine, a musician softly played a sitar.

After dinner Rajasthani dancers and singers performed on a torch-lit terrace. The women stamped their bare feet to the rhythm of drums, their ankle bracelets jingling.

A walled garden

Samode has such evocative style that it was used as a main set for "Far Pavilions," a BBC television mini-series based on a romantic novel of life in India.

Walking in the hotel's garden and among its brocade-draped tent cabins, I felt as if I'd stepped into an Arabian Nights fantasy.

The garden is about three blocks long and a block wide on a flat stretch of land about two miles from the palace, and enclosed by 15-foot-high stone walls.

Wild peacocks strutted among red-flowered hibiscus plants, and the sweet scent of jasmine bushes drifted through the garden, called Samode Bagh. A 200-foot-long row of fountains, fed from natural springs and wells, cooled the air. Manicured lawns, smooth as putting greens, radiated from a raised stone walkway. Six gardeners crouched on the grass, inching their way shoulder-to-shoulder as they pulled weeds by hand. In a white, open-sided marble pavilion in the center of the garden, a veiled woman crouched to scrub the tile floor.

Like much of Rajasthan's regal architecture, the garden shows the influence of the Moghuls, the Islamic rulers who controlled northern India from the mid-1500s into the 1700s.

Resplendent monuments such as the Taj Mahal - built by a Moghul ruler in the 1630s in homage to his deceased wife - date to this period. Walled gardens such as Samode's display the formal symmetry and order so characteristic of Islamic design - and so foreign to the more chaotic, incremental Hindu architecture and traditions that dominate most of India.

At one end of Samode's garden, 50 tent-cabins have been erected for guests. They're tents with a difference - the size of a standard hotel room and with carpeted floors, electric lights, comfortable beds and draped in rich brocades. Each has an attached tiled bathroom and a front porch on which to sip afternoon tea.

On the lawn, a jolly group from the British Embassy in New Delhi reclined in wicker chairs, talking of the next day's cricket match. They sang old English songs late into the starlit night. On the other side of the garden wall, the villagers sang, too - to the slow beat of a drum and mournful flute.

I fell asleep in my brocade tent amid this blend of Britain and India. And woke up the next day, ready to head back into the turbulence of modern Indian life.